Kiss Me Once

Summary

At the start of World War II, a football star fights gangsters on the home frontBrooklyn Bulldogs star defensive end Lew Cassidy is on his way to a touchdown when a nasty tackle snaps his leg and ends his career. When he wakes up in the hospital, he learns the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, and America is at war. It’s a shame his busted leg will keep him out of the army, because compared to New York, war is kindergarten. Cassidy’s closest friend is Terry Leary, a homicide detective who’s too slick for his own good. Just a few hours after Cassidy’s injury, someone puts a bullet in Leary’s spine. Cassidy leaves the hospital ready to avenge his friend—a fight that pits him against a gang of crooks who make him yearn for the comparative peace and safety of the gridiron.

Book Preview

Kiss Me Once - Thomas Gifford

Boston

Author’s Note

READERS WITH A KEEN SENSE of historical detail may occasionally find themselves confronted with what seems to be historical error. You may be right, so rest easy. The responsibility is mine, whether I was playing with things a bit to make a point or was simply mistaken.

There are, however, a couple of details which I can explicate at the moment. There was a National Football League game played at the Polo Grounds on the date in question. The visiting team was the Brooklyn Dodgers, a moderately hapless franchise which endured through fifteen seasons, from 1930 through 1944. The home team was, of course, the New York Giants. Not surprisingly, the Giants dominated the rivalry, winning twenty-two times, tying three, losing but four. Oddly enough, on the date in question, the real-life Brooklyn Dodgers prevailed, 21–7.

One might also inquire as to how, at 1:05 p.m. in New York, it could be 7:35 a.m. in Hawaii. The answer is simple. In those days, time zones were divided into half-hour slices once you got out there in the Pacific.

In the course of creating a group of characters bearing some resemblance to their counterparts inhabiting all of our lives, an author risks cutting too close to the bone. However, it is usually a bone or two of his own, which is doubtless for the best. In any case, should you find any specific resemblance to any specific individuals, then I’ve done a pretty fair job. But of course the resemblance is basically coincidental. And, finally, a word about the title. I had been considering the idea of telling Lewis Cassidy’s story for some time when I was following my normal custom one Sunday morning, listening to the world’s best disc jockey cum raconteur cum cabaret singer, Jonathan Schwartz. And following his normal custom, he wasn’t just playing a record: he was making a prefatory observation or two about it. The recording—Louis Armstrong’s, I believe—was It’s Been a Long, Long Time which, I suspect, most people think of as Kiss Me Once. He was making the point that, contrary to the bouncy rendition the song usually gets, it carried a very potent, powerful message that long-ago summer of 1945 when it was the country’s big hit. It was a song about the war and coming home from the war to a world that would never be the same again, to a life—as well as the loves in your life—that had changed forever. A whole lot had happened to everyone during those years. It had been a long, long time. And maybe the most you could really count on was a kiss and a prayer. That was what the story of Lew Cassidy was all about. Mr. Schwartz had given me the title. Herewith, my thanks.

—Thomas Maxwell

New York, May 1986

Prologue

CASSIDY WAS READY TO START killing people.

It occurred to him as he crouched in the cold and the darkness, aware only faintly of her excited breathing somewhere behind him, that if you pushed a man hard enough, if you backed him into a corner, if you killed his pal—well, then you either broke him or turned him into a nasty, scary piece of work. He hadn’t been quite sure which way it would go with him until now, and now he knew. There was still one person left alive he cared for and that was what tilted the balance. Made him realize just who and what he was at the core, what he must always have been. Waiting in the darkness of a very cold four o’clock, he smiled to himself. It was a smile of recognition.

He waited, kneeling on the floor he couldn’t see, resting the barrel of the Purdey over-and-under on the back of the couch, pointed directly at the doorway. The pale moonlight, forcing its way through the clouds, reflected off the deep crusty snow and he knew they were out there, deciding how best to get inside and do the job. The wind whacked angrily at the windows, rattling them in their frames.

Then he heard the first creak of footsteps on the porch. The snow squeaked as someone came slowly toward the door. Slowly. Cassidy knew he had one advantage. They didn’t know they’d been spotted. They weren’t being quite careful enough. He had one advantage and it wasn’t going to last long but the first guy through the door was going to pay a hell of a price.

The footsteps stopped.

The storm door was pulled back, wheezing on its hinges. The doorknob began to turn, rattling ever so slightly. The door was easing open, inch by inch by inch …

Cassidy heard the footfalls in the darkness, one, two steps into the room, the shape black on black, too hard for him to center the barrels on. Snow blew noisily along the porch.

Now, now, he willed her to do it …

She hit the wall switch and all the lamps in the room came on in a blinding flash.

The man stopped dead, threw an arm across his eyes.

Just as suddenly the darkness engulfed them again, like the hood dropped over a parrot’s cage, but the after-image of the man hung suspended before him as he adjusted the barrels.

The man with the long pistol in one hand, wearing a black-and-red-plaid parka, a matching hat with the earflaps turned down …

Cassidy centered on the memory of the man imprinted on his eyeballs and squeezed off both barrels and took the kick.

The shell casings ejected onto the floor and he slid two more into the chambers while the man was being sprayed back out into the night. Wood splintered, glass exploded, and he heard the corpse smack heavily onto the porch, slide across the slippery snow dusting, and crash off the edge, through the thick crust. The door had been blown off the hinges. It banged noisily, clattered off a wooden pillar, and pitched off into the snow. A blast of cold air poured in and the sound of the blast echoed and slammed off the walls and then after a while it was silent again.

She came and knelt beside him.

They’ve got to come inside to get us, he said. It’ll be a war. We’ve got to dig in.

They pushed the couch over to the stairwell and got in behind it, hunkered down in the nook below the stairs. They sat with their backs to the wall and she shivered against him. He kissed her hair and wondered if he’d ever see her face again.

The tommy gun began its unmistakable burping and the room was full of slugs and flying glass. It made a hell of a racket. Bullets chewing at the wall, slivers of wood and chunks of plaster spraying everywhere, splintering the knotty pine. He saw the flash of muzzle fire, like live electricity darting out, tongues of flame in the darkness beyond the holes in the walls where the windows had been only seconds before. Slugs thudded into the couch. He pulled her down onto the floor. Slugs were ricocheting off the stone fireplace. It sounded like a Panzer division rolling through the farmhouse …

He tried to pull the world in over their heads. She was grabbing at his hand, frantic, fingers icy cold. The guns just kept chattering and ripping.

Somewhere they were coming inside now, under cover of all the racket …

It was going to be over pretty soon and Cassidy held her tight, wondering what it all had meant, wondering if it had been worth it …

Behind the deafening din of the machine-gun fire he remembered how it had all begun, a Sunday afternoon a thousand lifetimes ago, a football game. It seemed like yesterday, watching the ball climb through the air and hang almost forever before it began to come down and the ground all around him started shaking and, hell, he’d been scared then, too …

Chapter One

LEW CASSIDY WAS TWENTY-NINE that year. An old twenty-nine because of a couple of things built into the core of his life. One was his occupation, the other was his wife, Karin. Together they’d put some years on Cassidy.

When he came jogging through the echoing tunnel from the locker room, the cleats chattering on the runway like a bad case of pregame nerves, and was funneled out onto the grass at the Polo Grounds, he felt as if he’d spent all twenty-nine years with a hangover. Which wasn’t of course the objective truth. The hangover that Sunday was strictly the result of Saturday night with Terry Leary. And it was a beaut, big and dark and mean, like a Cuban girl Terry had introduced him to at a New Students Mixer before the Bucknell game in 1933. Alicia had been her name and for a while there she’d been a lot more fun than this hangover.

But that was all old news now and Alicia had become a memory by the time they’d played Harvard two weeks later. The funny thing was, though, Terry was still running around with the prettiest girls in town and Lew Cassidy was still absorbing a weekly shit-kicking on the football field. One of the pretty girls was on Terry’s arm right there in Max Bauman’s box as Lew trotted past, lobbing a football to Frankie Sharansky, who actually caught it—something he’d never be able to do once the game started.

Hey, Lew, howsa boy? Come on over here—hey, baby, how ya feeling? Howsa head? That was Terry, standing at the box railing, beckoning with a pigskin-gloved hand. A flask bulged in the pocket of the soft caramel-colored polo coat with the belt like a bathrobe and a huge collar flopped up against the December wind. With his pencil-thin moustache and slicked-back black hair he looked like a cross between a movie star and the highest-priced gigolo in New York. He was a cop. NYPD, working homicide. With his looks, his personal manner, and the hot cases he kept getting, Terry was a star of sorts, certainly in his own circle, as Lew was in his, and Terry loved living up to the role he’d created for himself.

Lew, listen, I’d like you to meet Naomi. She’s a big fan of yours, right, Naomi?

Naomi was the kind of girl you never get to her last name. She was a redhead with too tight a permanent but Terry’s hair was cut well enough for both of them. The rest of her, so far as Cassidy could tell, was okay, though one beauty mark would probably have been enough. He figured she was wearing a little gold ankle bracelet, too. Terry had a collection of them in his jewelry box, said they always came off in the heavy going.

You’re just swell, Mr. Cassidy. She batted her eyes and looked at Terry to see if she’d read the line right. Terry’s told me what pals you are—

Sign her program, will ya, Lew? Sign it, ah, ‘Billy, I hope you’re out of the hospital soon and back to football—Your friend, Lew Cassidy.’ Kid’s dying, some damn thing, it’s her brother—

He’s not dying, Terry. He’s got polio …

Whatever’s the matter with the Kid, thatsa boy, Lew, Billy will love it.

Cassidy signed the front of the program. The crowd was getting noisier as game time approached. From nearby boxes people were craning their necks to see Lew Cassidy up close, without his leather helmet.

Thanks so much, Naomi said. Score a touchdown for me today, okay? She batted her eyes and looked at him from behind a grillwork of thick lashes, heavy with mascara.

Anything you say, Naomi.

Terry hugged her expansively, possessively, and puffed one of Max Bauman’s enormous cigars. He leaned forward like a man plotting mischief and winked. Not too many touchdowns, kid. I got five hundred bucks down says the Giants wipe the floor with you guys, twenty-one points or better.

Cassidy shrugged. You never know, he said. Which was a barefaced lie since everybody in the Polo Grounds knew Terry’s money was as safe as the crown jewels. They’d all come to see the Giants whip the Bulldogs but they’d also come to see Lew Cassidy score some touchdowns. He’d scored eight in the last three games, including three against the Bears, and was leading the league in both scoring and rushing. He’d had a helluva season, running from tailback like a Mack truck, providing the Bulldogs with enough offense to get the Giants’ or anybody else’s attention, but defensively the ’Dogs had crashed in flames long ago. Though Cassidy was undeniably a powerful, crushing runner, his play at defensive end when the ball went over was characterized more by energy and determination than by tackles. He had the defensive end’s fatal flaw: He was too aggressive, too eager to get into the play, couldn’t hold back and box the ball carrier in toward the clogged center of the field. Time and again he would overcommit, get taken out of the play by a blocking back while the runner cut up the turf going around him and heading off down the sidelines. In writing about Cassidy and the pitfalls of the end run, Grantland Rice had observed that Cassidy had the heart and soul of a born sucker and there’s nothing on the Good Lord’s green earth he or the Bulldogs can do about it. Cassidy felt it was always nice to be noticed. And Rice had also called him the toughest runner and headbuster in the game once you’re inside the twenty and heading for the end zone.

You got any money down yourself? Terry gave him an innocent, open-faced choirboy look. You want me to put some down for—

Come on, you know I only bet us to win. Haunts you if you go the other way.

Terry nodded. Cassidy had a hundred each riding on the Redskins and Sammy Baugh down at little Griffith Stadium and on Sid Luckman and the Bears to beat the crosstown Cardinals for the championship of Chicago. He hadn’t put a nickel on the game he was about to play.

Hey, Cassidy, get your butt over here. You got some football to play! Coach Horse Farraday was frowning at him over his spectacles. Nobody knew why they called him Horse because he was a small man who, with his long nose, tiny shining eyes, and weak chin, far more resembled a rat than, say, the mighty Seabiscuit.

The team in its black jerseys and pants with the red and white trim gathered around Farraday for a final inspirational word. The word was always the same. All right, you assholes, go out there and wear ’em down. Be tougher, be meaner, be dirtier, just so’s you don’t get caught at it. Wear the bastards down, don’t let ’em get their hands on the ball … It went on and on in that vein and Cassidy had been hearing it for seven years, which was a hell of a long time for a guy who carried the ball thirty, forty times a game. Today wasn’t going to be any different because Farraday was one of those wear-’em-down coaches who hadn’t had a new idea since Amos Alonzo Stagg was a pup. For seven seasons he’d had Lew Cassidy to wear ’em down. Give the ball to Lew and let Lew run over ’em and wear the bastards down. When it came to the forward pass, Horse Farraday figured there were three things that could happen to the ball when you started throwing it around and two of them were bad. He used to say that when the going got tough, the tough got going, which Cassidy figured was all well enough, except it was hard to keep saying it when you’d only won the one game and Christmas was less than three weeks away.

While Farraday kept on extolling the virtues of rock-’em, sock-’em play, Cassidy looked back at the crowd and saw that Terry and Naomi had now been joined by Max Bauman, in his black chesterfield with the velvet collar and the soft homburg, and a blonde in a mink coat. Her name was Cindy and she belonged to Max. Cassidy had met her last night and she’d—no, he couldn’t think about last night. Had to think about football. And anyway she was Max’s. But just then she looked like the symbol of beauty and chastity for whom Saint George might have slain any number of dragons. Either that or a Vassar girl at the Yale Bowl in a cigarette ad, though maybe that was only another version of the same thing. You never knew when it came to symbols. It was tougher to see Max Bauman as Saint George, unless your idea of the dragon slayer was five-five, Jewish, bald, easily induced to weep, and a big-time gangster. Max was all of those things and for all Cassidy knew the dragon hadn’t been made that Max couldn’t slay. Max saw Cassidy and gave the thumbs-up sign, which could have meant just about anything since Max was also the main owner of the Bulldogs though he didn’t like it generally known. Maybe if they were winners but, as it was, he didn’t think it was such a hot idea. A football fan, that was Max’s weakness, and the Bulldogs were, each and every one of them, his toys. Thumbs-up could have meant Cassidy should go out there and show ’em how a real man played this game, wear ’em down and rock ’em and sock ’em. It could also mean get out there and go in the tank because my pal Luciano’s bet half of Jersey on the Giants by twenty-one. You just couldn’t tell.

Behind Max, like one of the newer skyscrapers, was his shadow, a full load called Bennie the Brute. Maybe that’s how Max would deal with dragons and damsels and errant knights alike. Just wind Bennie up and point him and wait awhile for the screaming to stop. Anyway, they made quite a picture. The cop and the gangster with their cigars, the pile of muscle standing guard behind them, the remote can’t-take-your-eyes-off-her blonde on the gangster’s arm, and Naomi, who was just passing through, asking for Mr. Touchdown’s autograph, and moving on having added her ankle bracelet to Terry’s collection.

So, goddammit, you sorry piss ants, Farraday observed, concluding his final pregame remarks at the top of his lungs, go out there and play some football so you can hold up your heads and look ’em in the eye when you collect your paychecks!

He was such an emotional, inspirational leader. Cassidy could barely contain his enthusiasm. He was making six thousand dollars for the season, highest salary on the team, and Farraday was making four. Cassidy figured he earned his six and, if laughs counted, Horse was probably worth the four.

It was always the same, like standing at the bottom of a deep well of noise, waiting for it all to come crashing down on you.

A Sunday afternoon at the Polo Grounds, gray sky without any sun glare, not too cold, the grass mottled green and brown, spongy underfoot. He hadn’t gotten all the clumps of mud and grass from where they’d wedged between his cleats during the warm-up and now it was too late. He was waiting now, just waiting for the kaleidoscope to shake, for the game to begin.

The crowd was standing and yelling behind a curtain of smoky haze. The radio station banner, the big white letters WHN on a navy-blue background, hung from the broadcast booth on the mezzanine level. He glanced over at the scoreboard where the other games were listed. There wasn’t any word yet from Washington or Chicago but he knew he’d keep checking instinctively as his own game ground onward.

His helmet was pinching his ear, which was tender from last Sunday when somebody had knocked the helmet off in a plunge at the goal line and somebody else had kicked hell out of his head. His pads and jersey smelled like sweat from another century. By the end of the season they couldn’t clean the smell away anymore. Maybe winners had more sets of uniforms. He couldn’t believe the Giants smelled this crummy.

Cassidy was the lone return man. Art Hannaford had gone down with a broken leg just before Halloween leaving Cassidy as the only kick returner. Everybody on the team had congratulated Art, laughing at what Cassidy was in for. Art had gone back to his job at a bottling company in Hoboken.

Far away, on the horizon, beyond the drainage hump in the center of the field, the kicker moved up and the noise got louder, like the Twentieth Century Limited bashing through the bedroom wall, and he put his leg into the ball.

The ball climbed up the flat, leaden sky, end over end, like a fly moving up a gray wall. He waited for his depth perception to click in so he could get an idea where the hell it was going to intersect with planet Earth.

Kickoffs always scared him. Waiting, wondering what he was doing at twenty-nine, seven years out of Fordham, playing a kid’s game, wondering what would happen when the ball came down …

The ground began to tremble. It was always the same but nobody who’d never been out there for the kickoff could quite believe it. It was like an earthquake he’d once sat through in a Los Angeles hotel. He’d been scared shitless then, too.

It was doing a trapeze act up there, twisting and spinning in the gusts of wind, and he seemed to stand at the five-yard line for an eternity, waiting for it to top out. The Giants came down the field snorting and puffing and blowing like the horses Karin used to ride out near Princeton …

There he was, waiting for the kickoff to come down, and the crowd was on its feet bellowing and the ground was shaking and he had one hell of a hangover and even then he couldn’t stop thinking about his wife.

It was always the same.

He met her at the Winter Olympic Games in 1936. His father, Paul Cassidy, had put him on the payroll for the trip, calling him a talent scout for the sake of his accountants and the tax people. The football season was over. It would be a perfect time for the two of them to pal around together, visit Paris, and meander down to Nice afterward, all the while scouting the talent.

The talent that stopped Lew in his size tens was a twenty-year-old ice skater and the story going around Garmisch-Partenkirchen, the swanky German resort town where the Games were held, was that Adolf Hitler himself had his eye on her. In 1936 Adolf Hider’s name didn’t mean all that much to Lew except he was the guy running the whole damn country. The Germans seemed crazy about him and the posters of him on the walls were pretty striking. The Charlie Chaplin moustache didn’t seem funny—just somehow Germanic and authoritative. He seemed to have the country and the people revved up and everybody was having a fine time in Garmisch. The Führer thought the young skater, Karin Richter, was the answer to the twenty-four-year-old Norwegian Sonja Henie, who had brought her ballet training to the sport and revolutionized it while winning gold medals at Saint Moritz in 1928 and at Lake Placid in ’32.

The Germans were hopeful that winter of ’36. But, as it turned out, Karin Richter skated well and looked exquisite, which wasn’t enough to get a medal, let alone dethrone Henie, who won again. Rumor had it that Hitler canceled a reception he’d been planning for her had she won, and maybe he had. She never found out for sure, not even when she got to know Dr. Josef Goebbels, who was busy by then arranging his own parties for her. But that came later. At the time, Cassidy turned on the charm and told her the Olympics hadn’t been a complete loss for her. She’d met him. She’d nodded patiently but didn’t know what he was talking about when he told her he was the star tailback of the Bulldogs. Which only made him work on her all the harder.

Though he was the one who spotted her first, getting a good look at her early one morning when she was practicing at the rink just beyond the window of the hotel dining room where he was having breakfast, it was his father who approached her. Paul Cassidy was a movie producer back in Hollywood. He liked to insist that he was the first one with the idea of making Sonja Henie a movie star. Turned out he was a brick shy of a load in the money department but, then, that was the show business for you. If you were in the movie end of things, you didn’t even think about giving up. Paul Cassidy thought maybe he’d lucked into something when Lew dragged him out to the rink to watch through the morning mist the gorgeous girl doing her figure eights.

She was certainly a good enough skater to build a lightweight movie career around and, to tell the truth, Paul had never seen her as doing Lady Macbeth. He was, however, looking past strictly ice-bound pictures, past her legs which were unusually long for a skater, past that cute little fanny where Lew’s observations had stopped for some time to catch their breath and deliver a heartfelt sigh. Paul was looking at her face because, though he might not know about skating, he sure as the devil knew about movies. He knew it was the face that mattered. A woman could be badly underslung, flat-chested, bowlegged, and overweight, with all her springs badly sprung, but if she had the face—well, she had the face, and that was what it took to do the heavy work in the movies. Karin Richter had the face, all right. Classically high cheekbones, a nose just less than haughty length, which made her more approachable, level eyebrows over solemn, oddly pale brown eyes. Her upper lip was thin, the lower full, hinting at a kind of permanent pout, thankfully unlike her temperament. It was a face as likely to stick in the memory as any he’d ever seen.

Lew dropped like a stone into those bottomless brown eyes, the brown equivalent of the blue you sometimes saw in pure mountain lakes. He didn’t come up for air until he’d followed her back to Cologne, met her austere scientist father and faintly dismayed mother, and convinced her to marry him. They came back to the States together, Lew and Karin and Paul. Almost before she knew it she had a husband and a producer and was getting ready for a screen test.

Herr Dokter Goebbels, who was Hitler’s propaganda expert in Berlin, had to be consulted by Paul Cassidy regarding his plans for Karin’s future on the silver screen. Goebbels made a big deal out of it, talking about the German film industry’s vitality and the opportunity it afforded beautiful young German actresses, which was where Paul remarked that while that was undeniably true and he bowed to no one in his respect for the German cinema, it was also true that Karin was a skater, not an actress.

Just for the sake of argument, Joe—you call me Paul, Joe, Paul said over the cognac late one night after dinner with Goebbels and his wife, let’s say the girl comes to Hollywood, does the test for me, and she’s got something up there on the screen. That magic which not one of us can resist. But she’s still a skater, see? So she learns her way around the camera in her first five, six pictures. We’ve taken the risks, we’re stuck with the kid if she just sort of lays there. You never heard of her, see? But if she can act, if she connects, well, then we work out a deal. You want her to come back, do a picture or two every now and then, no problem. If we’re lucky, hell, she’s an international star. Whattaya say, Joe, why not let us take the risk for you?

Goebbels just laughed and grinned crookedly. He was a swarthy, funny-looking little geek with a clubfoot and damned if he didn’t wear his uniform to the dinner table. He limped across to where Cassidy sat uncomfortably on an austere chair, shook hands, said, For our American friends, why not? How can I deny her the chance to go to Hollywood? I’d like to see it myself; perhaps someday it can be arranged. Who knows?

Later Goebbels saw him to the front door where a venerable Daimler-Benz and driver waited to return the movie producer to the Adlon. Now listen to me, my friend, Goebbels said, shaking a finger beneath his guest’s nose, all in mock seriousness, I know about your movie business. All furriers and junk men and moneylenders—Jews, all of them. You take good care of our little girl, she’s your responsibility. Don’t let the Jews get their hands on her! And you make her a great star! They shook hands again and Goebbels said, "Auf Wiedersehen, Paul," and Cassidy went back to the hotel thinking about the impossibility of Goebbels’s final instructions. She should be a star … but no Jews could be involved. He shook his head. A contradiction in terms. So Goebbels didn’t know batshit about the movies, in Hollywood or Germany or anywhere else, apparently.

When Lew and Karin were married up at Lake Placid in 1938, the good doctor took time off from helping Hitler devour Europe and sent a lengthy Teutonic wire from the Reichschancellery congratulating them on their mutual good fortune, wishing them a long and happy life together, and hoping they would soon visit him in the bride’s fatherland. He also sent about five hundred dollars’ worth of roses, which cleaned out all the florists for miles around the little church where the ceremony took place. Karin blushed and frowned. More proof, the Nazis have no taste, no sense of restraint, she said. She found them intolerably vulgar, from their manners to their uniforms to their torchlit rallies. The only one I ever liked was Fat Hermann, she’d once told Lew, referring to Reichsmarschall Göring, the epic hero of the Great War. He bounced me on his knee once when I won a children’s skating competition. Pinned the little medal on my blouse. That was the only good thing he’d ever heard her say about the Nazis. Lew figured Fat Hermann was overly fond of little girls but had the sense to keep his mouth shut.

The warmth of Goebbels’s words as well as the sheer number of roses led Lew to believe that the propaganda minister had not seen the first Karin Richter picture which Paul Cassidy in his wisdom not only produced but wrote as well. It was called Murder Goes Skating. Lew never understood why stars like George Brent and James Gleason agreed to costar with Karin but apparently they both went